Doomsday Playlist

To a certain extent living through the cacophony of explosions deep beneath the earth, huddled together for moral support should make you appreciate your family, but it’s a love that still ebbs and flows. Before the war to end everything, I’d gone as far away as I could from them so that I could get some piece of mind and build my self esteem instead of staying and deflecting the quips meant to keep me in that place. Once things started to get real and the carrot-toned leader with corn silk hair began to stir the masses in every which way then take his escapade across the borders, I knew that with their mobilizations and countermeasures that I had to let bygones be bygones and return. 

I’d touched down after three overseas connections, two domestic flights and got an Uber home. The town had a certain electricity that it had never had before. When I’d lived there before college everyone had moved around lackadaisically and minded their own business on national and international affairs because they were too into what was going no with their neighbours’. 

When I had unpacked and caught up, I’d taken my Dad’s car into town to grab some things. Most shelves in all of the stores already were picked over. The toilet paper and bottle water were the first to go, just like it had been when the virus had hit a few years ago. I was only able to get some canned mixed beans, mac and cheese and salt-ladened instant pasta. I took 2 packages of sport’s drinks and went home.

In the initial days we huddled around the tv and tried to conduct some business on Zoom, but after a few months most methods of communication were either shut down or in certain parts of the country destroyed. My mother, who kept praising her skills of preparedness and horticulture learned from Girl Scouts, had lengthened the garden and had done a militant job of growing vegetables going as far as picking insects off by hand and chasing rabbits out of there at night. She’d later got me to help her can them and our walls in the bunker looked like some sort of country fair display or hoarding home.  

We’d been in the bunker for 287 days and my mother seemed to have developed some sort of shell shock that made her repeat things obsessively. We all had to continually reaffirm that her premonition about her garden was the thing that would keep us going in the end. It was the end that we waited for; that sort of silent darkness that led to a calming, ethereal light that we all expected to happen at any moment.  None of us expected to leave this bunker. After a time, I wasn’t sure why we’d come down here in the first place. Those little idiosyncrasies: my mother’s incessant chatter, my brother’s throat clearing or my father’s indigestion; bothered me to no end now but wouldn’t mean anything once that time came.

Then the day came that there was silence, the ground didn’t vibrate and the scent in what little air we had changed. None of us trusted that calm. We all conferred about opening the door, but no one moved. We’d been through all of our books, we’d looked at our photos and reminisced.  We’d check a radio that had had an antennae that reached out of our shelter, but it just hummed with static. We stopped verbalizing the question until one day my brother got fed up and went up to check; looking around outside for about half an hour, tapping the secret knock and coming in when my dad opened the door.

“What’s it like out there?”

“Our house is down to the foundation. There are craters all around and halves of trees and a few firmer ones standing. It’s drab. You see the sun, but it’s not clouds greying the day, it’s something else.”

I had to see it with my own eyes. I had to go outside and if any of these twits prevented me, I might fight like the caveman that I’d become. I told them I was going out to explore and was met with wide eyes, but no one blocked me.

Everything that my brother said was true. It was an unnatural muted tone outside. It looked like all of the battle shots that you’d seen of wars in the past. The destruction was everywhere. The road that had been about 150 feet away was desecrated. Our neighbour’s homes were shells or gone. The field looked like a pock-marked teenager’s face and as I squinted to look at the town, I saw what I imagined was rubble. I decided to be bold and turned on my cellphone and wasn’t surprised when it had no bars or reception.

I walked on down the shadow of the road that remained and was annoyed at myself when my phone buzzed in my pocket: I’d forgotten to turn it off and save the battery. Wait, I got service! I got a message!?!!?

I took it out of my pocket to see what was going on.

A Hinge message? What the hell? I opened it and looked. He didn’t look bad. Was I being catfished? I guess I couldn’t be too picky with what could be the only man other than my brother and father left on this earth. I was from a small town but didn’t want to play into that storyline.

When I opened the message it read: “Hello, is it me you’re looking for? Is anybody out there?” It had been sent that morning.

I responded: “Hey. How’d you know that I was still alive?”

I walked a little further when my phone buzzed again.

“Are you the only girl in the world?  I’ve been living on the edge for so long, it’s been no bed of roses and I could really use something to come down with.”

I felt like I was part of a name that tune trivia night, but decided to answer: “First, why are you talking in song titles? Second, where are you?”

“I’ve been trapped in my shelter by myself for over a year now and have been listening to my playlist on repeat. It was going to be ‘till the world ends but now I think I’ll stick around.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head: “What is your exact location, like a city or whatnot? Or what was it before this happened?”

“I live in Bakersfield.”

“The actual place, right? You aren’t talking about the song, right?”

“No, no. the place or where it was. What about you?”

“Porterville.”

“Oh. That’s close”

“Not really.”

“It’s close compared to everything else. And you’re still alive. Meet me half way on the 99. We’ve gotta try it’s been a hard knock life for too long.”

I rolled my eyes then typed: “I have to go back to my family and talk to them.”

“Family? More people? I’m coming to you.”

“Alright. Let me see. Our place is near…” What the hell could I say? Everything was levelled. “It’s off the second side road out of the levelled town, it used to be called Greenwood Lane and there’s a green sock with chillies on it tied to the tree stump.”

“Ok. Get there when I can.”

“Alright. I’ve got nothing to do but wait.”

I took off the stinky sock and tied it to the singed branch and went back and told my family what had happened.  When I went down into our home, I told them about the messages I’d received. They seem skeptical about this guy who’d managed to survive this dire situation. I had to convince them that if we could, anyone could. My mother was protective about our food stock and I said maybe he’d be fine. I wasn’t even sure if he could find our hideaway. The directions were pretty vague and the suspense would become as heavy as the air outside.

I’d been waiting for god knows how long when there was a rap at the door. My Mom picked up the broom, which really wasn’t going to do anything in her weak grasp and my brother took the gun that he’d acquired prior to being holed up. If he knew how to properly use it, I’d be surprised. My father inched to the door and slid open the peephole.

“Hello. Who are you?”

“Jude Cole. I talked to your daughter, I guess.”

My dad looked at me and I nodded then looked through the hole and was happy that he looked mostly like his picture however slightly sweatier and had a full mane of hair and a shave that looked like a blind man had done it.

“Hey, Jude,” I said wincing as soon as I realized what I’d done.

“Hi, so nice to finally meet you.”

I opened the door and he ambled in, shaking my Dad’s hand and moving farther in to greet the rest of my family. We learned that he’d walked all the way to our place and had known the way because he’d been a truck driver for a bit when he was younger. He had been in IT before this all happened and had his own sort of supply cupboard back in Bakersfield in his own shelter so my Mom could rest easy with her collection of food that she didn’t want to share.

“Once I got closer to your town it seemed like blurred lines everywhere. The powerlines were down, the streets destroyed and had no names. I wanted to turn back but have been alone so long that I had to shake it off and go on.  Being in that shelter by myself, I was so upside down. My emotions were everywhere listening to the boom, boom, pow! I had to get out. I had to keep the faith that one sweet day I would.”

Listening to him was like reading the play list in the jukebox that you ordered off the shopping channel. I could feel his need for human contact and I knew that I didn’t want to be around my family and no one else for eternity but I wondered how to break him of what I guess to have been a traumatic response to his predicament.  I’d have to try, maybe take his iPod, or just shower him with regular conversation, anything to break the need to scream out the artist’s name or finish the song.

It’s been a minute and for the most part the game of Name that Tune has ended or reduced or something. Jude and I have built and rebuilt a shelter to live in. Our computer savviness did little to nothing to help us after the world went up in smoke, but we are learning through trial and error. He looks better with a good hair cut and shave and his water purifier came in handy with what we found in the area. He and my brother moved the things from his shelter back here since this area seemed to be slightly less hopeless and we are starting over trying to remember how people did it before you could Google the how to steps or watch it on YouTube.  I don’t know if we found love, but only time will tell.